Hong Kong, the ultimate charter city. Photo by Steve Webel.

When urban and transportation issues get talked about at the state or national level in America, they quickly are translated onto traditional left-right splits. The reasons are plentiful. Conservatives have distrusted the deep anti-traditionalism and cosmopolitanism of cities since time immemorial. City-dwellers tend to be more liberal on a range of issues, so urban issues get bundled with those into Democratic party politics. Public transit tends to serve lower-income populations and reduces greenhouse gas emissions, making it very attractive to the left. And so on.

There’s absolutely no reason, however, that most of these issues need to be so closely identified with left and right. Any lefty urbanist worth their salt could list off five incredibly destructive government interventions into the urban built environment for each positive one. Paul Weyrich, someone with about as many conservative movement bona fides as you could ask for, is a strong transit advocate. Those of us on the left, looking for sustainable and equitable smart growth, should be looking at the right for ideas. In particular, the libertarian right has a lot to offer urbanists. Cities are the sites of cultural freedom around the world (a few communes excepted) and, although generally heavily regulated, also the engines of economic innovation. There is room for a discussion here.

In particular, I’m very intrigued by Paul Romer’s TED lecture on “charter cities.” The idea is that rules—whether laws, social norms or corporate practices—matter a great deal in determining outcomes and so therefore we should seek innovation and improvement in rules exactly as we do in technology. Romer contrasts photos of North and South Korea and Haiti and the Dominican Republic to show how important governance really is for development. It’s a point that no one should argue with.

The solution, according to Romer, is to create new cities on uninhabited land across the world. These cities would begin with a charter, a new set of rules for the development. Romer believes that in general, these charters would be written and administered by developed nations and the charter cities would be in the developing world. He gives the example of Cuba transferring  control of Guantanamo Bay to Canada. These charter cities then would try to attract immigrants and firms and build a new city from scratch. If successful, places around the world could copy these charter cities and individuals could move there. The archetype is Hong Kong providing the model for China’s Special Economic Zones and its subsequent market reforms.

It’s a remarkably appealing idea. How many among you wouldn’t want to start over without practically the entire public domain given over to motor vehicles, without subsidies for sprawl, without neighborhoods still torn and scarred by urban renewal or the riots of forty years ago, without entrenched NIMBY power, without all the rules that we daily complain about?

Romer’s not quite right on the details of his proposal. He’s a brilliant economist but not actually trained in incorporating geography into his work, and it shows. For example, much of the success of the Special Economic Zones comes from their not being located in remote, uninhabited areas. They are in and around some of the most developed parts of  the country. The most iconic SEZ, Shenzhen, is immediately next door to Hong Kong. Cities are economically vibrant because of their interconnectedness, within and between cities; a charter city could capture many of the benefits of existing cities, whether their infrastructure or their population, while still having a very different set of rules by situating nearby. In fact, this is a decent way of understanding major parts of American suburbia.

Additionally, his protestation that this is in no way colonialist because you can choose to move into them entirely voluntarily doesn’t ring true. It’s not conquest, but it’s something. Why have Canada administer the charter city at Guantanamo rather than Cuba itself, or Brazil, or some NGO, or the UN? That each of those scenarios feels quite different seems important.

Finally, like all libertarian proposals, it underestimates corporate power. In a very positive review of the charter city concept, Worldchanging lists all the many rules that stand in the way of creating sustainable cities. Two that stuck out, though, were insurance policies that required streets that emergency vehicles could travel on and banks’ lending policies. The charter city concept would need some way to allow for as much innovation in corporate rules that shape our cities as in governmental rules.

Even so, Romer’s basic premise is extremely valuable. There is very little variation in the rules of our cities. What are the truly grand experiments in urban form within a nation? Even catastrophic interventions into our cities, like urban renewal, are done almost everywhere at once. There are a few older examples—Portland’s growth barrier or Houston’s lack of zoning—but generally the incentives for cities push against innovation. We are, correctly, unwilling to undergo an experiment that could fail hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of residents. Even New Orleans, post-Katrina, was barely used as a laboratory; it would be too cruel were the experiment to fail. Large-scale innovation—not the kind that says we should put in more bike lanes but the kind that would make all of downtown car-free—is not possible in American cities.

Figuring out how to introduce innovation in rules, which Romer is correct to argue is critically important, without endangering our cities, is an essential project. His specific proposal needs a bit of work, but the broader idea has the supreme virtue of having a low cost to failure. His website is http://chartercities.org/. Look around and see if you can’t figure out a way of applying the best parts of his ideas to already-existing metro regions. My half-baked thought after watching his lecture was that a committed bunch of urbanists should choose a dense inner-ring suburb and just take it over. In the spirit of innovation, can you come up with a better idea?

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